


Mint and Hemlock

by Maker_of_Rune_Vests



Category: Thor (Movies), Thor - All Media Types
Genre: Arranged Marriage, F/M, King Loki, Knitting, POV Sigyn, Post-Thor: The Dark World, Pre-Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-08-08
Packaged: 2018-12-12 22:39:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 14,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11746635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maker_of_Rune_Vests/pseuds/Maker_of_Rune_Vests
Summary: Credit to Marvel, the Loki fandom (this is the Tumblr of my favorite Loki and Sigyn fan artist: http://loki-and-sigyn-only-fanart.tumblr.com ), Wikipedia, Marvel Cinematic Universe Wiki, Comicvine.gamespot.com, Marvel Database, comicbookmovie.com, etc.In Chapter Nine I used information from something originally from 1907 quoted in this article section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_venom#Vipers_2





	1. Chapter 1

I, Sigyn, am writing our story because neither Loki nor I is the sort of person who will be remembered well in our realms. This will not fit with the ballads of Nornheim or the sagas of Asgard, and will contradict the history books of both; but it is true, even if I am tired because baby Nari never sleeps at night.  
My story is normal for my childhood. My father never stopped cooking, and my mother never stopped talking; I was always thin and often loquacious, neither of which made sense. I liked herbs and runes and singing, and so those were the forms of magic I learned—nothing very magnificent. I was a pretty girl, but not beautiful, and tended to forget why I was where I was because I was reading or daydreaming about either doing something heroic for Nornheim or about falling in love. Despite the fact that I couldn’t ever have hurt an enemy, and I never talked to young men. I was a close cousin of Queen Karnilla, through my mother, but she had a son, so that was not significant except that it meant she visited us and Father became nervous and burnt everything—including his tunic, one time.  
It was shortly before Asgard invaded us, because they had heard that Queen Karnilla was planning to have an insurrection and was trying to tame rock trolls, when I went to gather rosehips and was chased by a rock troll that was not tame.  
I think that rock trolls want affection, and that’s why they carry off maidens. They don’t know that if they hug us or pat us we’ll die because they are very strong and stone, because they are not very intelligent. Most people say they carry off maidens because they enjoy crushing us.  
This one looked like a cairn among the rosebushes until it creaked up out of them, eyes made of amethyst staring at me, half a rosebush draped over its shoulder. It was a white one, made of quartz. It drew off the half a rosebush and threw it at me, and then threw itself at me. I ran, realizing that I was between it and a cliff down—and closer and closer to the cliff down as it ran towards me. I should have tried to get it to fall over the cliff by going close and then running away, but I didn’t have the heart to do that. Now I would do it, even though I would feel sad about it.  
I realized that I was still holding my basket of rosehips, and dropped it from the troll to trip on. It didn’t trip. It grabbed me around the middle and picked me up in the air, looking at me, squeezing my ribs with a white quartz hand. “Please put me down,” I asked. “You’re hurting me!”  
It gritted—and then a dagger flew into its amethyst eye, and little chips of amethyst went past me a moment before I fell on the ground and everything went white with mist. A rather cold hand—it felt cold through my woolen sleeve—pulled me back under rose branches. “Shhh,” someone said, and the mist disappeared, and I saw what looked like me lying on the ground in front of the troll. I put my hand over my mouth. The illusion got up and ran towards the cliff, and the troll chased it, and they both vanished over the edge. Then I heard quartz shattering.  
Whoever was beside me stood up, and I looked up to see a very tall man wearing black, with a green cloak wrapped around him. It had a hood, but either he hadn’t had it up or the rosebushes had taken it off. He had a pale, fine-featured face, that looked a little older than I, and black eyebrows that were not in communication on what they were doing. He held out his hand to me, and helped me up.  
“Are you injured?” he asked, in a much deeper voice that I would have thought he would have.  
“Not much,” I said. Bruises and rosebush scratches. “Thank you for saving me.”  
He nodded. “Monsters do not comprehend pleading,” he told me quietly; and there was mist again, in the opposite direction from my home, and he picked up his dagger and went from sight in it.  
I didn’t think that he must have been an Asgardian reconnoiterer until after they invaded us and escaped in mist.


	2. Chapter 2

Three years later, Queen Karnilla arrived at our house while I was dying yarn with madder. I had crimson splashes of the dye all over the front of my old yellow dress, and had sat in more of it. Also I was wearing very old shoes that I had tried to embroider runes on, with socks with runes on them that didn’t match each other because I had run out of blue yarn.  
We did not look like cousins. I and my mother both had hair the color of a deer, and had wrists like children and blue-grey eyes with large pupils. Queen Karnilla was curvy and beautiful and had black curls and a purple silk dress that made me embarrassed because my undergarments were more modest than it was. She came without any servants, and walked into the kitchen, and said, “Gynny, you’re going to be the queen of Asgard.”  
“What?” I said.  
“Even if you are my cousin, call me ‘your majesty.’ You are engaged to marry Odin, who, as you know, recently lost his queen. I would have given him a daughter, but I do not have one. You are my nearest marriageable female relative. You may sit down.”  
We sat down on wooden chairs. I felt like I couldn’t possibly really be engaged to a four thousand-and-some-year-old enemy king. Married? I—oh, help!  
“He thinks this will help keep us from warring again. Of course we will not stop until we are free. Your job is to influence him in our favor, and be my spy if I need one. I will visit you with illusions. For Nornheim’s sake, you will try to win his heart. You’re a pretty girl, and he is ancient. Gynny?”  
I almost said that I was not Gynny. I also almost said that now I knew from which side of the family Mother got talking all the time. “Will this really help Nornheim be free, your majesty?” I asked.  
“It will lull him, influence him—and you may act against him, if I think it necessary. I do not like assassination, but it is better than that a tyrant lives for another thousand years.”  
“I couldn’t kill someone!” I exclaimed.  
“Anyone can kill someone,” Karnilla said gravely. “But for now, being pretty is better.” She handed me a little box wrapped in purple cloth. “Only open this if I tell you to.”  
Then my mother came in, and I tied knots in a piece of undyed yarn while she screamed at Karnilla and probably committed treason. Mother can scream for hours, and then Father came in, and found out what was going on, and hugged me, and said I would be a heroine and he wished he could make the wedding cake and Mother was still screaming and Karnilla left and Father said he would be a mess and Mother cried in his arms and I ran to my room and lay down on the floor because I didn’t want to get madder dye on my bed.  
I would still be able to see my parents, unless Odin was very unkind, but I was panicking because he was so old and ferocious. I had only become old enough to marry ten months ago, and he was one of the oldest beings in Asgard or Nornheim; and he was the enemy of Nornheim; and I had wanted a husband I was in love with, and to have babies. Would it be better if Odin liked me, or if he didn’t? And I would have a stepson. Thor. We were all afraid of Thor, with his lightning hammer and his red cape. I had to laugh at the idea of being his stepmother. And there had been another prince, but I thought he had died—in fact, I thought that I had heard that he had died in two different years. I wasn’t sure if he would count as a stepson…. I laughed and then I started crying.  
After I had stopped crying, I thought about how this would be good for Nornheim, and heroic like I’d always wanted to be, and I tried to look like a Norn heroine in my mirror. The madder stains looked like juice, and my nose was red, and I looked only half grown. But Queen Karnilla knew what was good for Nornheim, and if she said this would be, then it was my duty to do it. So I washed my face, and I went down and took the yarn out of the dye.  
Four days later, I was very nervously waiting, in Asgard, to meet Odin. Everything in the room I was standing in was gold. Everything here seemed to be gold, and colorful capes. I was wearing black with boots because it made me feel braver, but now I was worried that Odin would think it was rude. Mother had been too busy talking to tell me to wear something pretty. I felt like I might become ill. And then Odin walked in, and closed the door behind him, and we looked at each other He looked like he was trying to remember where he had seen me before. He only had one eye, and was wearing golden armor and a red cape. He looked kind and elderly.  
“Welcome to Asgard, Lady Sigyn,” he said in a straightforward voice. “I am Odin.”  
“Thank you, sir,” I said. I didn’t call him ‘my lord’, because I was a Norn, not an Asgardian.  
“You may address me as Odin. Please be seated.” I sat down on a golden chair, and he sat down on another golden chair. “I presume you know Lady Karnilla’s purposes for this marriage.”  
“Yes,” I said. “Queen Karnilla told me of them.” I was quite ready to be polite and nice, but I also wanted to stand up for Nornheim’s right to freedom.  
“My purposes are a closer bond with Nornheim, and to stop the realm’s distress over my having no heir. My son Thor has relinquished the throne, and my son Loki is dead.”  
“I’m sorry,” I said.  
“It’s better for him and Asgard. But as I was saying, do not be frightened. I intend to treat you as a sister or daughter; there will be no heir.”  
He looked much kinder to me.  
“Keep that in secrecy,” he said.  
“I will.”  
“As for what else we have to discuss—you may do anything that is not law-breaking or harmful to Asgard, and you may visit your parents as often as you please, provided you spend most nights here. If you wish anything or have a problem, I will endeavor to help you. “  
“Thank you,” I said. “You’re very kind.”  
He did not help me up, which was odd though I didn’t mind. Maybe it was because he was old. Then he did open the door for me.  
I tend to be loquacious, and I’m sure nobody but me needs to know all the details of that day. So I will only describe the wedding. I was not very interested in it at the time, except that it meant I would officially be married, but later it became much more important to me.  
I gathered that the man who was performing the wedding had not performed one since he had married Odin to Frigga, his first queen. Since then, Odin had officiated at all weddings. The man was very old, nearly five thousand, I guessed, and could not remember the vows well, and so Odin and I stood staring at each other while he mumbled, “Do you take this lady to…be your wedded wife, bound to you by the laws of Asgard and…ah….Nornheim?” I could hear my mother loudly crying, and I realized that this was funny, even though it was bad; and I saw Odin’s mouth twitch. “I do,” Odin said.  
Leif asked me, “Do you take this king to be your wedded husband, bound to you by the laws of…Nornheim and Asgard?”  
I realized that I had my hands knotted like the design on the floor. For Nornheim! “I do,” I said.  
And then there was a feast, and my parents went home; and when I went to lock the door between my rooms and Odin’s, just to be sure it wouldn’t open, he had locked it.  
I fell asleep wondering why he had been careful never to touch my hand, even when it had been strange for him not to. Useless explaining about that was better for sleeping than thinking about my husband being a enemy king who had lived for more than four thousand years.


	3. Chapter 3

I think that everybody must have been comparing me with Queen Frigga and groaning. I assembled a garden of herbs in pots in my rooms. I was lost in the Palace five times. I tried to find out if there were poor to help; there weren’t. I rescued beetles and spiders. I visited my parents once a week. I tried to be friendly and helpful. I became friends with Volstagg’s wife, Flosi, who liked me because I liked her children; and Lady Sif would patiently answer questions. I was present as feasts whenever Odin wanted me to be, and traveled around Asgard with him. He never even helped me up steps or gave me his arm. I decided he must have taken a vow never to touch a woman again after Queen Frigga died. He was always kind to me; I felt like he was my great-uncle, even though he wouldn’t let Nornheim be free and changed the subject when I tried to talk about it.  
It bothered me that Odin had nightmares. Some nights I would hear him pacing. At first I thought he was exercising, because he sounded lighter than usual, and like he was taking extra long steps. But it sounded nervous and tormented, like someone trying to walk so fast that they lost themselves. And other nights I would hear him moaning, or even crying out or talking. He sounded younger than when he was awake. I wished he would try mint tea; my type of mint tea is always good for nightmares. Many of the men who lived near me when I was in Nornheim and who had been in battles said it made them not have them.  
I offered it to him, about two weeks after we had married. “I’ve noticed you’re having trouble sleeping. Would you like me to make you mint tea? It help with that.”  
“I’ve been sleeping sufficiently well,” Odin said briskly. “But I thank you.”  
After that I heard less pacing, but just as much crying out. Once I even heard him calling his mother. If the door hadn’t been locked I would have gone and woken him up and tried to make him drink tea. I did wonder why my husband, whom I was trying not to think of as Uncle Odin, slept worse than my grandfather, who had fought trolls and Asgardians—they had both been in battles, and had similar minds.  
Queen Karnilla’s illusion appeared over my thyme one day when I was watering my herbs. “Gynny, are we alone?”  
“Yes, your majesty.” I set my watering can on the pad I had knitted for it.  
“How does Odin like you?” she asked.  
“He is very kind to me, and likes me to go to different parts of Asgard with him.”  
“Is he in love with you?”  
“Not that I know of, your majesty,” I said. That was true.  
“Flatter him and fawn on him until he is,” Queen Karnilla said. “Soon some little group of Norns will attack Asgard if we are not allowed to be free, and then there will be battles. Have you tried to tell him why we have the right to be free?”  
“Yes. Six or seven times. He does not become angry with me, but he will not talk about it,” I said.  
Queen Karnilla sighed. “Keep attempting, Gynny, but do not make him angry with you.” She had purple under her eyes. “Do you have anything else to tell me?”  
“Odin sleeps badly. He has nightmares, but he says that he does not.”  
“Really? You should try to find out more about that. He may be ill; Nornheim needs to know. I will talk to you again soon, Gynny.”  
She vanished.  
He slept worse that night than usual. Usually I couldn’t hear anything he was saying clearly, but tonight I could tell he was having a nightmare about his father being angry with him. I had read chronicles of Odin’s reign in the library, and hadn’t seen anything that should have made him dream about his father being angry with him, but probably he had been.  
I got out of bed, put on a robe I’d knitted, and walked into my sitting room. My plants looked like small monsters in the dark, and I looked like a ghost in the enormous window through which one could go to the balcony. I tried the door to Odin’s room; it was locked. He didn’t even sound like himself. “I could have done it, Father!” He had said that more times than I could count. Though it was muffled, so I wasn’t wholly sure that I was hearing him right. I wished I could do something. People shouldn’t have nightmares; sleeping should be when all is serene.  
I opened my window and went out onto the balcony, which I hadn’t done before. I was shy about people seeing me up there in the daytime, because it was windy and I always have bad fortune with wind and dresses. And at night I usually was in bed reading sagas, or else wishing I could make Odin drink mint tea.  
The balcony was longer than my window. Odin’s window was above it also. I walked over to it, and I saw that it was open a bit, even though it was a cold night.  
I might not have done it if I hadn’t been tired, if Queen Karnilla had not told me to find out if Odin was ill, if he hadn’t cried out again right then, and now that I heard him clearly, sounded nothing like himself.  
I pulled the cold window out, for it was like a door, and walked into my husband’s room. There was a lamp lit, on a table a few feet away from the bed on the other side of it—he sat up much quicker than he could move usually, and he did not look like Odin against the lamp. Taller and thinner. I froze. Green light shone around his lifted hand, and I saw his face. He was older; his black hair was messier; but whoever this was, he had saved me from a troll.  
He looked at me with slight dismay. “Bother,” he said dryly.


	4. Chapter 4

“I remember you!” I said excitedly but quietly. “You rescued me.”  
“I thought you looked familiar,” he said. He stood up, and turned the lamp brighter.  
“What is going on?” I asked. I knew I was not in the wrong room. “Are you Odin?”  
He looked at me for a few seconds, and then walked behind me and latched the window, and gestured towards a chair. “Please be seated, Lady Sigyn.”  
I sat down, buttoning my coat up. His room was ridiculously cold.  
“No, I am not Odin,” he said, looking at me from his height. “May I ask what you are doing in my room?”  
“I heard you having nightmares, and I wanted to give you tea. What are you doing in Odin's room if you aren't Odin?”  
He sighed. “I am engaged during the day in masquerading as Odin, and therefore sleep in his room at night, when unfortunately I can control neither my appearance not my voice. I am Loki.”  
I stared at him.  
“I can tell you that I did die. I am not dead now, if you're fearing that you're married to a revenant.”  
“Oh,” I said. I sat up straight on the chair and tried to figure out what was happening. “You're Loki, you died, you came back to life, you pretended to be Odin,” I said. I felt as if I were learning a knitting pattern with twenty steps involving slipstitches.  
“Precisely,” Loki said.  
“How?” I asked.  
“I can't tell you anything.” Loki sat down on the bed, facing me. “Nor anybody else. The reason is worse than the results are good. But tell me, do you intend to betray me?”  
I thought about this. “Not unless you've committed murder,” I said.  
“Why not?” he asked.  
“For one thing, Nornheim. My marriage with Odin was supposed to help Nornheim, and I don't think it still would if our realms found out you are Loki.” And then I gave the stronger reason. “And besides, they'd force you to take poison.”  
“Decapitate me,” Loki said calmly. “Why do you not want that to happen?”  
“You saved my life!” I said. He was very odd. “And besides, I don't think anybody should be executed. Imprisoned if they are too dangerous, but not executed. We know not, they might change if they live longer, they might have reasons they….” I turned pink because I'd started philosophizing.  
He was looking at me with more interest. “Would you protect a murderer, because you do not believe in executions?“ he asked.  
“Are you one?” I asked.  
He hesitated, two lines creasing between his brows. “In ascending to the throne? No.”  
“Then I will not tell,” I said sincerely.  
He looked as me like he was trying to read my mind, and I looked back at him. No wonder I had thought Odin didn't sound like himself at night.  
“Are we really married?” I asked.  
“By Asgardian law, yes,” he said. He stood up. “I will accept your word. Remember that you cannot touch me without showing that I am not Odin, and that those who betray me tend to regret it.”  
“I will,” I said. Well, nightmares were nightmares, even if the husband wasn't the husband. I really didn't know what to think. “Will you come have some mint tea? It won't take long to make it.”  
One of Loki's brows rose. “If you wish,” he said politely, and opened the door between our rooms for me.  
I think he was trying to make sure I didn't poison him with the tea, because he watched me, and even went over and touched the mint plant and smelled his fingers.  
***  
Theoretically, finding out that one's four-thousand-year-old husband is actually an elegant prince in disguise would be excellent. Actually, if he is cynical, mysterious, and about as communicative as herbs, it is simply bewildering. I didn't know what to think, but the next night I knocked on his door and asked him to come have tea again. As far as I had heard, the tea last night seemed to have helped him sleep.  
That night nothing happened except that he drank his tea and let me awkwardly talk about the weather. I was willing to be friendly, but he didn't even seem to want to have his chair near mine by the fire.  
Still, I asked him to come the next night, and he did, moving his chair away from the fire as I brewed our tea. “Thank you,” he said when I handed it to him. It was too hot to drink yet. “Do you use magic in making this?” he asked.  
“I don't use magic to make tea, but I think it is magic, how mint helps dreams and stomachaches.” I blew on my tea. “But most Norns say that herbs only are magical if they ward off evil spirits or make people love each other.”  
Loki nodded. “I would agree with your view,” he said. “The other is like that of Midgardians, who call all they can effect science, and anything they cannot effect magic and fabulous.” He drank a little of his tea. “Do you practice any other forms of magic, Lady Sigyn?”  
“I sing to my herbs,” I said. “It makes them grow better. And I use runes. However, some of them, like Kaun-I don't want to give people ulcers.”  
“Ulcers? If Kaun is what you denominate Kenaz, it is for setting wood on fire.”  
“I'm sure it's for ulcers,” I said. “Mother used it to give them to Father early in their marriage.”  
Loki's mouth twitched. “Watch,” he said, and set his tea down on the table and stood up. He picked up a piece of wood, drew his dagger, and carved Kaun, two adjacent sides of a diamond, into it. Then he ran his finger over Kaun, blurred his hand back, and tossed the piece of wood into the fire. I saw the flames in the shape of Kaun on the piece, and then the whole piece of wood caught fire faster than it should have.  
Loki looked at me. “You're right,” I said, “but it is for ulcers too.”  
He looked slightly irritated. “Prove it,” he said. And then one of his brows rose. “No, don't prove it.”  
“You're sure you don't want ulcers?” I asked, trying not to start laughing.  
“Well, it would be an excuse for more magical tea,” he said, and smiled at me as he sat down on the gold-upholstered chair and picked up his tea mug.  
I smiled back. “Do you think we can be friends?” I asked. I have never been good at making friends, in the sense that though I often make friends, they usually feel like it happened peculiarly.  
Loki drank some tea. “I do not think being a friend is in my nature, Lady Sigyn,” he said quite seriously.  
The next afternoon, I was singing to my herbs and wondering if he couldn't be a friend or if he just didn't want to be friends with me, when Queen Karnilla's illusion appeared.  
“Good afternoon, your majesty,” I said.  
“Have you made him fall in love with you, Gynny?” Queen Karnilla looked worn.  
“No,” I said. “But he comes in the evening and drinks tea with me.”  
“Trust you to be told to be alluring and end up serving tea,” Queen Karnilla said with a small smile. “Talk to him about Nornheim's independence tonight.” She dissipated.  
I moved my chair farther from the fire too, that night. “May I ask you something?” I asked Loki after giving him his tea.  
“Yes, of course. “  
“Why does Asgard have the right to stop Nornheim from being free?”  
“Fourteenth,” Loki said quietly. “Nornheim should be proud of its agent. At this rate, by the time we've been married a year you'll have pled for its independence a hundred and sixty-two times.”  
“Loki, we've been ruled by Odin so long that only the oldest Norns can remember when we weren't. Can't you fix that?”  
“I believe I or even Odin is a stronger ruler than Lady Karnilla.” His face was cold. “And surely two thousand years is long enough for a king to become rightful.”  
“But we have different-“  
“Lady Sigyn, I appreciate your tea and company, but I am not to be convinced to let an entire realm flout Asgard simply to please you.”  
I looked down at my brown mint tea. I don't know why green leaves make brown tea.  
“I do not blame you for being an agent for your realm, or for offering friendship to influence me,” he said less coldly.  
“That wasn't why I asked to be friends,” I said. I had that feeling when I'm getting upset and I'm going to cry, and I can't stop the feeling but hopefully I can not actually start crying.  
“That wasn't why I told you that friendship is not in my nature,” he said. He looked rather sad, and then he smiled wryly. “Would you like me to be Odin again?”  
“No, I was starting to think of him as Uncle Odin, and feeling awkward because we were married,” I said.  
Though really, I was feeling quite awkward with Loki, even though he did not feel like an uncle. I felt like something hadn't gone right when he thanked me for the tea and went to his room, and I wasn't just upset that I hadn't gotten anywhere about Nornheim. He was wrong about not being able to be friends, and I even thought that he wanted to be friends, but he thought I was just pretending to want to be friends!  
The next night Loki was not at the palace, and the day after that I went to visit my parents. I told my mother everything that I was allowed to tell her.  
“You won't get anywhere mentioning Nornheim for a while,” She said. “He's a man. He doesn't like a woman telling him to free her country. Get to know him better, there's plenty of time, and by the way I made you a new dress, I hope you like the color it came out brighter yellow than I meant it to and also I think longer than I meant it to but it's silk and you look tired are you sure you aren't going to have a baby?”  
Beans boiled over in the kitchen. “I'm sure,” I said, and imagined just staying here, sleeping in my room where almost nothing was gold colored, not kept awake by someone else's nightmares, not feeling useless both to Nornheim and to Asgard. But I had to go back.


	5. Chapter 5

Loki didn’t come home until early morning, and spent the time until sunrise taking a very long quick walk in his room. I did wish that I knew what to do for him, besides giving him unaccepted friendship and mint tea. He was very sad, I thought. I needed to find out more about the last few years in Asgard.  
Poor Lady Sif looked patient when I came to her in my screaming yellow dress. She had been practicing, and was wearing her armor. “Good morning, my lady Sigyn.”  
“Please just call me Sigyn,” I said.  
“I do not think that would be proper,” Sif said. “Did you want to ask me something, my lady Sigyn?”  
“If you have time, could you tell me about Thor and Loki?” I asked. “I know you are Thor’s friend, and I want to know more about my stepsons.”  
Sif rested her arm on a stair railing. “Their characters or their deeds?”  
“More their deeds, especially in the last few years. I’m trying to understand why Asgard is as it is.”  
You all know most of what she told me. I was still realizing that if Loki was a Jotun, that explained why he didn’t want to sit near the fire, when she said, “Loki tried to murder Thor with the Destroyer.” My mouth fell open. I wasn’t sure what the Destroyer was, but what—how—I rather zoned out until she said, “Thor told me that Loki killed eighty Midgardians.”  
“What?” I gasped.  
“I’m sorry, I forgot that you are not accustomed to hearing about such things, my Lady Sigyn,” Sif said, looking like she wished Odin had left me in Nornheim. She explained why Loki was dead and Thor was not king, and I heard her, but I was thinking, “Eighty people…eighty people…eighty people! Tried to murder his brother?”  
“May I be excused, my lady?”  
“Yes, of course. Thank you for telling me about them,” I said, and then I walked through the palace to my room and locked myself in and sat down on the floor near my herbs. Eighty people. Killed eighty people. His brother.  
Maybe it wasn’t true. I wouldn’t believe it was true unless he said so or there was more evidence than just one person saying so. But what if it was true? He’d said that he wasn’t a murderer “in ascending to the throne.” He’d invaded Midgard a year before he’d ascended the throne….  
I had started to care about him. He had been kind to me, and he was sad, and either of those would have made me start to care about him. And I liked that he sensed humor. I had really wanted to be friends. Maybe he hadn’t killed eighty people.  
I felt ill by night. He knocked on my door, and I opened it. He came in, carrying the largest book I’d ever seen in my life, and set it down on a table in my sitting room. “I found this while in Alfheim,” he said. “It’s an herbal; they believe that all herbs are magical, as you do.” He looked up from it and smiled at me, as if he were hoping I was pleased to see him or the herbal or both. Then he looked concerned. “Are you unwell, Lady Sigyn?”  
“Did you try to murder your brother?” I blurted. “And kill eighty people?”  
The smile vanished; he became taller and bitter as rue. “Possibly. I was deprived of the scepter that I’d notched to keep count of them,” he said.  
“You did what?” I said. “You—“  
“No, I did not keep count,” he said. “Yes, I killed a number of Midgardians.” His hands tensely and quietly attacked each other until he folded his arms.  
“How could you do something like that?” I said. “Eighty people. They had families and they were people. Your brother.” I had tears running from my eyes. “I didn’t believe it until you said you had. You seemed so kind, not a monster!”  
He just looked at me. “Do you still think we could be friends, Lady Sigyn?” he asked wryly. I shook my head. He went back to his room, and I sat down on the floor again and cried for a long time. Then I lay back on the floor. Why in the nine realms was the ceiling gold? I could see the undersides of my herb leaves, and that huge book going up from the table. He’d hoped I’d like it. What sort of person killed eighty people and also carried a heavy book all the way back from Alfheim just to please some girl they’d ended up politically married to? Or, for that matter, interfered with a rock troll to save a girl from an enemy country? He didn’t make sense. Surely a hardened criminal wouldn’t have been so upset when I asked him.  
A sage flower fell on my forehead, and I heard Loki pacing. He just wasn’t like someone who would murder eighty people he didn’t even know, much less try to murder his brother with the Destroyer, whatever that was when you had one.  
I covered my eyes with my hands and thought. Perhaps he’d changed since then. But he hadn’t been like that when he saved me from the troll. Perhaps something had made him do it. I fell asleep on the floor and woke up to a whole stemful of sage flowers on my face, and Loki doing what sounded like sobbing into his pillow in his sleep. I was sure he wouldn’t have let that be hearable if he hadn’t been asleep.  
He just wasn’t someone who would decide to kill eighty people. I got up and knocked on his door, and tried to think what to say as I heard him wake abruptly.  
He looked cold when he opened the door. “Are you in need of something, Lady Sigyn?”  
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was thinking, and you aren’t the sort of person who would do that, and you weren’t, so either something was making you do it, or you became evil and now you’re good again. And so I’m sorry I called you a monster.”  
I looked up at him, and he looked back, creased between his eyebrows, tense.  
“Will you come have tea again?”  
After a few moments, he said, “If you wish,” and closed the door behind him, coming into my sitting room. He stood by the door and watched me put water to boil over the fire, looking thoughtful.  
“You should sit down. It will be a while until it boils,” I said.  
“Lady Sigyn,” he said suddenly, “I’m sure you’ve heard that I fell into the abyss?”  
“Yes,” I said.  
He walked to the big window and looked out, far enough away from it that nobody would see him. “If I’d wished to kill Thor, I would have made the Destroyer breathe fire,” he said, and then after a few more minutes, “A carving is worth a thousand runes. Would you object to seeing my back?” he said very unexpectedly.  
“No, that would be all right,” I said.  
He came and sat down on the couch, which I hadn’t used yet—I had nobody to sit close to, and always preferred to either read in bed or while pacing—with his back towards me, and pushed the back of his green shirt up.  
I could see that he was scarred even in firelight, from three or four paces away. When I came closer—they were old, and I had seen plenty of wounds on Nornic warriors, but I realized that there were scars that looked like cuts, and scars that looked like burns, and they were a collage on his back, as if both had happened to him two or three times. I sat down on the sofa, starting to imagine that. “What made those, Loki?” I asked gently, my hands clutching the tan basket weave of my knitted coat. “Do they hurt?”  
He let his shirt down. “Monsters I hope you never even hear of, Lady Sigyn; and they only hurt if there’s a storm or brother coming.” He was still facing away from me. “These were not the objective. I have a strong magical resistance to mental alteration, but that is not the case if I am experiencing discomfort…. I still remember Thor tossing me into the Abyss, but I know he did not,” he added.  
“Did they know about this, when you were imprisoned?” I asked. Because if there were such a thing as mitigating circumstances, torture and mental alteration would qualify!  
“No,” Loki said. “I could have proved the physical part, but I—it’s not as if Asgardians would consider that a good excuse. Thor would have picked up a stone and died fighting, if he’d gone to the Sanctuary. I couldn’t prove that my mind had been ravaged.”  
“So you never told anyone about this.”  
“What would I have gained, except being told, ‘You’ve always been a talented liar’?” he asked, turning to look at me. He looked younger than usual, green eyes unguarded, a strand of hair in his face instead of nearly glued back as he usually had it; he looked like someone who was telling about a nightmare that had made them want to keep their lamp burning until Ragnarok. “Nothing. Mother would not have said anything of that nature, but—could you tell your mother you’d been tortured?”  
I impulsively hugged him, reaching up a bit to put my arms around his shoulders, feeling a hidden dagger in his sleeve and him go from as stiff as a tree to as unbendable as stone. He felt cold, like someone who was always in a cold house, and his heart was beating hastily. I let go of him, because he couldn’t have been stiffer, at exactly the same moment that he put his arm against my back—not a hug, more of an allowance that he wasn’t angry that I’d hugged him. I’m not sure which of us looked more awkward subsequently, because I couldn’t see myself, and I wasn’t looking at him.  
“It’s boiling,” I said, and got up and made two cups of tea with twice as much mint as usual because I forgot that I’d already put mint in my little brown pottery tankard I used to brew tea.  
“Thank you for the herbal,” I said, once we were both more or less breathing out mint steam.  
“It looked as if you would find it interesting,” Loki replied. “I confess I did not understand all of it when I was looking through it; herbal magic not being something I have often practiced.”  
“Maybe we could study it together,” I suggested.  
“Possibly,” he said, and smiled a little at me. And I was certain we were going to be friends, or were friends, though I expected him to refuse to admit it for weeks.


	6. Chapter 6

Three weeks later, I found out that there would be war. Queen Karnilla appeared illusorily, looking as if she hadn’t slept for a few nights. “Gynny, have you talked to Odin about our freedom?”  
“Not for a while, your majesty, as I said the last time you came. Mother said to wait, because it wouldn’t work to just keep talking about it. I hope it’s right that I did that.”  
Queen Karnilla sighed. “She was likely right. It’s too late now. There will be a war, soon, even though I do not want to have a war. You should try to persuade him to be merciful to prisoners, when he takes some. I hope I haven’t endangered your life, Gynny.”  
I managed to talk. I felt like I had failed, and like all the new wounds that Norns would have were my fault. “You haven’t,” I said. “I trust him. He drinks tea with me almost every night, and we’re studying herbal magic together. I’ll try to ask him to be merciful. Do I need to keep it a secret that there’s going to be a war?”  
“No necessity; we’re riddled with Asgardian spies. Does he know that you’re communicating with me?”  
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “He thinks I’m a Nornic agent.”  
Queen Karnilla smiled at me. “You are, Gynny,” she said, and vanished.  
I went and played with Volstagg and Flosi’s children, and helped her cook supper—she needed help cooking supper, married to Volstagg! Howbeit, I was still feeling like this was my fault, even though I knew I’d tried to persuade him to let the Norns be free.  
I did find it interesting to live at a time like the times in legends, when there would be heroes and love of freedom and noble deeds. It was better than a time of nothing, one side of me thought. But most of me knew that there would be death and wounds.  
There was a feast that night, and I sat beside my husband, wearing a shimmering green dress that wasn’t something that I should wear while eating. I couldn’t eat much of anything, because when I am worried I feel ill.  
“Are you all right, my dear?” said Odin’s fatherly voice. The better I came to know Loki, the odder it felt to pretend that he was Odin. You have to admit that trying to interact with someone as if he were your elderly uncle whom you know but aren’t that close to, when you know that he’s young and the night before you were sitting on a couch trying to hold onto a very heavy herbal while debating about if grass was even worthy of herbdom, would be odd. But I needed to do it, so I did my best.  
“I’m all right,” I said.  
He avuncularly put a nice little piece of cheese on my plate, and looked like he thought he’d fixed my anxiety. If I’d not been feeling so upset, I would have had a hard time keeping a straight face.  
I wasn’t surprised that Loki came much earlier than he usually did for tea, before sunset; I’d closed the curtains so nobody would see him. “What is amiss, Sigyn?” he asked, sitting down beside me as I knitted with green yarn.  
“That people will die if there’s a war, and that I haven’t done anything that would help stop it, and I could have, maybe,” I said, keeping knitting and trying not to just start crying. I don’t think there is anything wrong with crying, but it interrupts conversations.  
“Don’t think like that,” Loki said. “I recognize it—it’s the sort of thinking that leads to patricide, near fratricide, and attempted suicide. Well, perhaps you wouldn’t go that far.”  
“I’m an only child,” I said. “So the middle one certainly wouldn’t happen.”  
“If there is war, it will be Nornheim’s fault, not yours,” Loki said. My yarn rolled off the couch, and he caught it before it hit the floor and set it back beside me. “I shall not like our being on opposite sides,” he went on, quietly.  
I shook my head. “I’ll be on two sides.”  
“Nornheim’s and Asgard’s?” Loki asked, with the same expression as when I said that I liked to rescue spiders so people wouldn’t kill them. “You’ll be quite unhappy.”  
“No, Nornheim’s and yours,” I said, knitting a triple decrease.  
“That might be an even worse idea,” he said softly. The little green loop was just tidily through the other three little green loops when he said, “Would you care to watch an eclipse?”  
I made a couple more stitches to make sure the triple decrease would stay made, and then set my knitting on the table. “What is being eclipsed?” I asked, smiling at him.  
“Odin called it after Thor when he was born, so that’s what Asgardians term it. Midgardians call it Jupiter; and Norns call it….”  
“What does it look like?”  
“Like striped marble.”  
“Oh, we call it The Evil-Eyed, and children like to look at it and scream.”  
Loki laughed. “Will you come view the eclipse of The Evil-Eyed tonight?”  
“Of course.”  
So late that night, after studying summer and winter savory and having our tea, I followed Loki through the palace. He looked like Odin, of course, and I probably looked like a girl with her grandfather. I didn’t bother to keep a straight face. It was dark, anyway. But then I thought about that there was going to be a war….  
Why were we here? It was a vaulted area, lit blue by a rectangular glassy-looking object with metal edges, sitting on a pedestal. We were the only people in sight, but I still felt worried when Odin dissipated. Loki appeared too pale to be real in that blue light. “Don’t touch me; you’d be frostbit, even though I am but half Jotun,” he whispered, and touched the rectangular object, the light shining around his pale hand—which turned blue. I had heard, of course, that Jotuns were blue, but it was still a little startling to see Loki change to that color. It silently ascended, coming above his high collar and over his face, until he stood there in the blue light, that only made his color stronger now. He was looking at the relic, probably the Casket of Ancient Winters that I had read about in a saga about Odin, as tense as he’d ever been; it seemed like he was afraid to look at me…or to have me touch him, which made no sense if it were possible to be half Jotun. His parents must have been able to touch each other.  
“Loki?” I whispered.  
His eyes were red, all red, darker in the middle, and if I hadn’t known him I would have been frightened; but he looked tense and sad, not frightening. “Yes, it’s I,” he whispered. “Should I have told you I was going to do this?”  
I smiled at him, taking a step to right beside him. “I wasn’t wondering who you are.”  
He stepped back from the casket, and the blue left the opposite of the way it had come, leaving his face and then a few breaths later, his hands. “That was perilous, Sigyn.”  
I shook my head. “The frostbiting must be a weapon. After all, how could you be half Jotun if Jotuns were that cold all the time?”  
He contemplated that, the lines between his brows becoming deep. “You may be right.”  
It was clear that he felt so unlike himself in his Jotun form, that he’d assumed I wasn’t even sure if he was Loki. I thought that it would be good if he knew that he was not untouchable. “We study magic,” I whispered. “We should find out if I’m right.”  
“Are you mad? Have you ever seen frostbite?” He nearly forgot that we needed to whisper.  
“Yes, my neighbor had it. If it’s small, it will heal soon,” I whispered. “But I’m sure I’m right.”  
He looked at me for a few moments, and then put a hand on the Casket, pressing his lips together, and as the other hand turned blue, held it out to me. I touched it lightly, and he wasn’t any colder than I would have been if I’d been handling ice. So I slipped my hand in his and looked up at him. He was looking at our hands, and that moment is why I know that even red eyes, even seen by blue light, can look misty. This time when he took his hand off the Casket, the blue dematerialized both ways, from his face and from his hands, which were carefully turning mine over just to make sure that it was not frostbitten.  
“You’re right, my Sigyn,” he said softly, and I was still wondering if he’d meant to say that, or if he’d forgotten that he wasn’t Odin, started calling me “my dear,” and then used my name, when he let go of my hand, took on the likeness of Odin, and started walking away, saying, “The eclipse will start soon.” I followed him, and one of the Einherjar walked through the room, behind us.


	7. Chapter 7

We were sitting on the floor in a cobwebby room high in the Palace, staring out the large window as lightlessness, seemingly moving slower than mint roots grow, tried to blind the Evil Eye. Loki watched it like he had been on The Evil-Eyed once and wished he could go back again, though I knew it was not a place where even a master of magic could go. He tended to look at places and people as if he missed them.  
I was having a hard time focusing on the eclipse, for on the one hand there was about to be a war, and on the other hand I was falling in love with my husband. It was when I was hoping that he had meant to say “my Sigyn” that I realized that I was. And then, just to make these things I had learned especially tranquilizing and not daunting, it was my country and his country that were going to fight. But I shouldn’t think about falling in love, if there was going to be a war…could I have done more to stop it? I shivered without meaning to, and a few moments later Loki encompassed me with tremendous amounts of cape.  
“Thank you,” I whispered, regardless of that the cape was going to be overly warm.  
A bit of the edge of the Evil Eye was lost to our eyes, and then more of it. And then, the Evil Eye was nonexistent, and if children in Nornheim were watching, they probably were shouting victoriously.  
As the bit that had first been blacked out started looking at us again, someone knocked on the door. “My Lord Odin, forgive me, but the Norns have attacked!”  
I felt like the floor rocked back and forth like a cradle at the hands of a toddler.  
About a quarter of an hour later Loki rode off to war, as Odin, with golden Einherjar following him, and a package of dried mint for tea that I had given him, and I was standing just outside the palace, still with enormous amounts of cape. Green? I panicked for a moment, and then saw that it was red.  
I went to his dark room and folded the cape and set it on the foot of the bed, and just stood there hoping deeply that nothing bad would happen to him, or my parents, or any of the Norns, or any of the Asgardians. It was a hope that would not come true. If the Norns had attacked, people had already been killed. We used poisoned arrows.  
I went to bed, and did not sleep. Early in the morning I wandered around the palace until I found many women who were not warriors working at making ready bandages and salves. I was not an expert at either of these, but I wanted to be helpful.  
“My lady Sigyn,” Eir greeted me. “Are you in need of something?”  
“May I help?” I asked.  
Eir shook her head. “We have many women here who are practiced at doing this, my lady.”  
That made sense. “Please tell me if I can help.”  
But as I was walking away, I heard a woman called out, “Please tell me if I can poison?”  
I turned around. “I’ve never poisoned anybody!”  
“Norns are poisoners,” a different woman said. “Barbaric.”  
My neck felt overheated. “Beheading is more barbaric!” I said, unpremeditatedly.  
I was called something I’m not going to write down.  
“It is inappropriate to speak so to the Queen!” Eir said.  
“I’m sorry I called you barbaric,” I said. “I lost my temper, and I shouldn’t have.”  
And then I made a bad decision and went to Volstagg’s house. The children were playing Asgardians and Norns outside, and one of them threw a wooden battleaxe at me.  
My herbs didn’t mind that I was Nornic. They were Nornic too. I spent the next week with them, knitting an entire blanket; wishing I were allowed to be useful, wishing that I could see my parents or Loki; fretting about Loki, my parents, and the whole populations of both realms. It wasn’t an enjoyable week, but it was worse for many other people.  
On the morning of the eighth day, cheering and shouts of “Odin! Odin! Odin Allfather!” woke me up from a dream where I made everybody knit instead of fighting. Loki knocked from his side of the door after I’d quickly dressed (of course I managed to seize the screaming yellow dress first), and I opened it.  
He didn’t look like himself; or rather, he didn’t look like the side of him that he usually showed me. He was wearing a golden helmet with prodigious golden horns with dangerous looking ends, and armor, green and black and gold all over, and a trailing green cape; all in all, quite formidable, but it was his countenance that made me feel alarmed. None of looking like he missed everything, or looking bemused. His green eyes were frigidly bright, and I remembered that mud usually wasn’t as red as those splotches on his cape, and armor, and hands. “Loki, are you all right?” I asked.  
“Never better. I’m being lavishly applauded while pretending to be Odin by a populace who would call Thor to exterminate me if they knew I am Loki,” he said dryly. “I can’t stay long. Stay here this forenoon, Sigyn; don’t leave your room.”  
“Why?” I asked as he turned to go, his green cape brushing against my ankles. “Are you angry with me because I’m a Norn, so you don’t want to see me?” That wasn’t a sensible question, but I had been worrying about if he would be like the other Asgardians were about my being Nornic.  
He turned back, face softening a little. “Not at all.”  
Yells of hatred and gibes leapt into the air like seeds from a touch-me-not, coming up to my open window and probably above. “Poisoners! Woman-ruled! Bloody invaders! Axe-meat!”  
“Oh,” I gasped. “Oh, you have Nornic prisoners, and this forenoon you’re going—“  
“Shut your window and keep it shut until the middle of the day,” Loki said gently.  
“Loki, you can’t just kill them!” I gripped his wrist—even that was hard; he was wearing a metal bracer. “You could imprison them, and then they still wouldn’t fight you!”  
“Nornheim would,” Loki said, voice crisp. “Whereas Karnilla might think twice about sending warriors to murder my people if she knows that they will die for it.”  
“They have families, the Norns do, and they were just fighting to be free,” I pleaded.  
He pulled his arm away from me. “Outside a cottage I saw a little girl who had cried herself to sleep on her father’s chest. Her thumb was in her mouth, and there were ashes stuck to the tears on her cheeks. And her father had an arrow in his eye.” Whatever toddler kept rocking the rooms around here, enthusiastically did it again. “I believe in death for death and chaos for chaos. Now, if you’ll excuse me.“ He started walking away.  
“Do you know how soldiers are chosen in Nornheim?” I said, tears in my eyes. “By lot, and if you don’t obey, you’re forced to take poison.” He didn’t pay attention. “You know what that’s like! You—you know what it’s like to be punished for it.”  
He turned around sharply, and I started. “I like your temerity, Lady Sigyn,” he said in a way that meant that he didn’t like it, staring at me with his head lowered like an angry dragon.  
I really didn’t mean to cry, but the tears in my eyes opined that they would be happier on my chin, and rolled down my cheeks. “My father could be one of them,” I said.  
Loki lifted his head. “He is not. I had all of them asked their names, to ensure than none of them was Nari Narfisson.” He walked to my window and stared out of it, probably at nobody, since I couldn’t hear rudities anymore. “I shall imprison the commoners, rather than execute them, but I will not mitigate the deaths of the leaders,” he said. “I’ll give the Einherjar orders not to let you out of the palace until it is over.” He left the room before I could do more than make a squeaky noise that was me trying to start saying a word.  
Why he thought I needed forced to stay in the Palace, I’m not sure. I was not so egotistical as to think that the Nornic leaders would have wanted me to be there, or to think that I could rescue them.  
Hours of pacing, hours less for those Norns to live. I was silently crying.  
“Is it true that Odin is killing them all?” Queen Karnilla’s illusion demanded from behind me. I wheeled. She had been crying too.  
“No,” I said. “He’s imprisoning the commoners, and executing the leaders.”  
“Better than I thought, but still bad,” Queen Karnilla said.  
A huge amount of cheering. Queen Karnilla’s illusion and I both froze, and then as the Asgardians cheered again, I hurried over herbs in pots to my window and yanked it shut, tears flowing. I didn’t know who the leaders were, but they were dead.  
“Did they have families?” I asked.  
Queen Karnilla nodded. “Give Odin the hemlock that is in the purple box I gave you.”  
“Hemlock?”  
“Give it to him, Gynny.” She vanished.  
I took the purple box out of the bottom of my yarn basket, and unwrapped the cloth. It was a little metal box; and in the metal box was a small glass bottle sealed with a cork and black wax, with a greenish-brown liquid inside. Poison hemlock.  
I doubt there’s a much stranger feeling than knowing that you’ve just been told to poison someone who trusts you, unless it’s knowing that doing that is the way to make sure your realm is free. The bottle was so minuscule. I put it back in the box and wrapped the box in the purple cloth. It looked like the same material as Queen Karnilla’s dresses.  
Hundreds of hooves clipped out of town as Loki rode away again to fight against my realm.  
I never considered poisoning him. Sometimes during the next week I wondered if I ought to, but I knew that even if I ought to I wouldn’t.  
I tried to visit the Nornic prisoners to see if they needed anything, but the Einherjar said that the king had commanded them not to let me visit the dungeons.  
Loki came back for a day, a day where he did nothing but handle court cases and wasn’t at dinner, and finally, late at night, came to his room. I knocked, holding the bottle of hemlock.  
He looked tired. “Yes, Sigyn?”  
“Queen Karnilla told me to give you this,” I said, holding out the black-sealed bottle.  
Loki’s hand touched mine as he took it. He lightly rubbed the black seal. “Possibly she would have been pleased had you unsealed it for me and decided in what I should consume it,” he said.  
“I might have been considered a national heroine,” I said, not at all wistfully.  
Loki disappeared with the bottle, and I heard the sounds of it being dripped down a drain and rinsed out. He came back without it. He did look very tired, like he wasn’t sleeping or eating.  
“I should let you sleep,” I said, moving out of the doorway.  
“Are you still angry with me, Sigyn?” he asked, surprising me.  
I looked up at him. “What happened to the little girl?”  
“I found her mother, and we left them with the mother’s brother who lives in a village farther from Nornheim.” He leaned against the doorframe.  
“I’m not angry with you,” I said.  
“I was unkind to you. I repent that, though not retaliation.”  
I half shrugged. “I think when one is on two sides, one has to either be angry with everybody or be sad about everything.”  
Loki reached out his hand to me, and I put mine in his.  
Somebody knocking at Odin’s door. “My lord Odin! Karnilla herself is attacking!”  
“I’ll be there at once!” Loki shouted, sounding like Odin. He turned to me. “Magic for staying awake?” he whispered, and rushed off.  
It was a jest, but I sat on my bed and tried to make him magic for staying awake. People always laugh at how I cast runes. I wrote the rune for an Asgardian on my hand with my forefinger, and then wrote the rune for ice on it. Then I had my finger on my hand to write the one for sun when it sprang to mind that that might make him glow. So I wrote the rune for day, and then blew them like a kiss the way he’d left. That part is why people laugh at how I cast runes.


	8. Chapter 8

It was that night that I realized that knitted blankets could be useful if people were wounded. In the morning I took the four that I had knitted since I came here, and three that I had brought with me, and managed to carry them to the healing rooms.  
Eir met me. Somebody likely had told her that red, green, yellow, and blue blankets were walking this way.  
“Would these be useful, Lady Eir?” I asked, looking at her over red and white knitted runes.  
“Yes, they would, my lady Sigyn,” Eir said, taking some of them from me. “These are very nice.”  
I followed her to a linen closet where she put them. “Would more be useful?” I asked.  
“Certainly.” Eir smiled at me. “I’m glad you’ve found a way to help without making unreasonable women shout.”  
I laughed a little. “I don’t blame them. Norns have a very toxic reputation.”  
So I spent my time knitting, as quickly as I could, just solid colors so I could make them more quickly. I had made a third of a blanket when a maid brought me a note.  
“From my lord Odin, my lady,” she said.  
“Thank you.” She left, and I opened the note. It was sealed with red wax.  
“To Sigyn from Odin, greeting. I shall not be able to return to Asgard for some time. If you are willing to do so, hear court cases during my absence, leaving any capital ones. I have given orders that should you hold court, your judications are valid.  
“Did you send magic to make me wakeful? If so, it was efficacious. Remember that not everything is worthy of your sadness, my Sigyn.”  
I thought as I was reading it, “Odin…I suppose somebody might have read this…oh. I’ll miss him. I do miss him. Help! I don’t even know Asgardian law! Oh, good, I’m glad it worked.” And then the last two words made me mentally indescribable, and the letter kissed.  
By the next day, I had figured out what to do about the problem of needing to hear court cases but not knowing Asgardian law. I would ask the men who were in charge of justice under the king to tell me what cases I would be hearing on the next day, and then read about the law for such cases.  
It went beautifully, except that I ended up at midnight trying to figure out exactly what laws applied to a case of two men who each said that the other had painted something embarrassing on the outside of the palace using boar blood. Technically, that wasn’t a crime, but false accusation was a crime—but was it a crime if one falsely accused someone of something that wasn’t a crime?  
And then Queen Karnilla decided to make my night lovely. Her illusion appeared on the other side of the table from me. “What in the Nine Realms are you doing, Gynny?”  
“Trying to figure out if it’s a crime to falsely accuse someone of something that isn’t a crime, Your Majesty,” I said.  
“It isn’t, but the accuser should apologize,” she said. “Are we alone?”  
“Yes.”  
“Have you not had a chance to give Odin the gift I gave you for him?”  
I cannot lie and have anyone believe me, and I believe that lying is wrong. “I had a chance,” I said.  
“Why didn’t you take it?”  
“I gave the hemlock to him.”  
“But he’s alive. Sigyn, what did you do?”  
“I told you I couldn’t poison someone,” I said. “It’s wrong, and he trusts—“  
“No one can trust you,” Queen Karnilla said, leaning over the lawbooks. “You are banished forever from Nornheim, and your parents will never be allowed to go to Asgard.” Her cheeks were scarlet, but her eyes were sad. “I’m sorry, but I cannot condone double loyalty.”  
“No!” I cried. “I just couldn’t—“ She vanished.  
No. No. No. This had to be a dream from being up at midnight reading law books. No. Why couldn’t I cry? Mother would be heart-broken, and Father—they didn’t have any children but me—I would miss them—I was going to be looking at everything like I missed it, like Loki—  
I thought these sort of thoughts for a long time, and then I decided that Karnilla had been right about the court case, and went to bed and thought those sort of thoughts, the note Loki had sent me under my pillow.  
It was the perfect preparation for a day of hearing court cases.  
I dressed appropriately, in a yellow silk gown and a green cape, and for the first time put on a headdress that had been in my room. I surmise that Loki told someone to make the new queen a headdress, before we met, and didn’t bother to say what it should look like. It looked like a symbolic depiction of a horrible headache—and I had one of those, so it seemed fitting.  
I think I did fairly well. Most of the cases were simple and obvious, and though people looked at me without friendliness and somebody called out, “Nornic soppiness!” when it was proved which man had actually marked the palace and I made him apologize to the other man, there wasn’t a rebellion.  
I came across Flosi as I was leaving the throneroom, and smiled at her. She smiled back, which I hadn’t thought she would. “You’re a good judge, my lady Sigyn.”  
“Thank you,” I said.  
“It’s been a long time since you came to my house.”  
“Oh, I wanted to, but since your husband is fighting the Norns, and I’m a Norn, I wasn’t sure if you’d want me to,” I said.  
Flosi blinked. “He isn’t fighting you,” she said.  
I smiled. “I’ll bring the blanket I’m knitting.”  
“I’m weaving one,” Flosi said.  
So I spent that afternoon knitting while Flosi wove and told me about her bewilderment over how her youngest child loved animals and cried about meat.  
Through the next couple of weeks I studied cases, heard cases, and knit blankets, and worried. Asgard was losing the war because of poisoned arrows. I wanted Nornheim to win and be free, but I didn’t want people to die from poisoned arrows, and I worried all the time that Loki would be hit by one. Twice I tried to nurse a wounded Asgardian, but both times he became disturbed because I was a Norn.  
Two weeks after I started hearing court cases, there was a truce, for both sides to write possible terms of peace. I was up at nearly midnight putting a green border on a brown blanket that had come out smaller than I had wanted it to, when I heard horses and people, and ran through the palace to see Odin and the Warriors Three and Lady Sif all coming in.  
I greeted Loki, acting like he was Odin, and then stayed out of the way while he did all the things Odin would have done. Apparently, happily, one of those was going to his queen’s rooms before two in the morning.  
I was waiting, of course. He looked tired and pressured, but he smiled when I half ran to meet him, and gently took my hand. We smiled at each other for a few moments, and then at the same time I said concernedly, “You need to rest,” and he said concernedly, “You look as if you have been sleeping poorly.”  
That made us both laugh. “Of course that doesn’t have anything to do with it being two hours after midnight,” I said, wondering if he would be pleased if I hugged him. “Can you stay long?”  
“Tonight; tomorrow I must present my terms to Karnilla, and she will present hers to me.” An odd expression crossed his face. “A charade; both of us will make our terms unacceptable. She, because with poisoned arrows Nornheim can defeat Asgard, even with our greater number, even with my generalship. I, because I have a better way to end this war than granting Karnilla her whim—a better way which I ought to have taken long ago.”  
“What is that?” I asked, disturbedly.  
“Has Karnilla discovered that you did not poison me?” he asked, changing the subject. I loved him dearly, but he was too evasive. (I should have penned that in present tense.)  
“She did.” It’s odd how talking about something about which one has become calm, can make one not be calm at all about it. But I didn’t cry. I looked at our hands—his slender and white, mine just barely pinker and mostly disappeared in his. “She banished me, and my parents aren’t allowed to come to Asgard. I’ll never see them again.”  
Loki released my hand, and I hoped he wasn’t angry that I’d let the serpent out of the sea to Karnilla—oh, he wasn’t. My face was buried against cool green leather, and he held me as if he were trying to guard me. “This would never have happened had I not married you,” he said.  
I hugged him, and the way that he always felt like he’d been in a cold room, and the way that he was still a little stiff, weren’t disheartening, because that was simply how Loki felt and was. “You told me that I shouldn’t think in that manner,” I said, my voice breaking unexpectedly.  
Loki gently stroked my hair. “When I win this war, you shall see your parents again—if not in Nornheim, then in Asgard. You have my word, which will always be trustworthy when given to you.”  
I didn’t find out how Loki planned to do that until nine days later.


	9. Chapter 9

The terms had been rejected, Loki had gone back to war, and I was finishing another blanket one cold Asgardian morning, when Loki stumbled through the door between our rooms and crashed onto the table, sending yarn and knitting needles onto the rug. I sprang up, sending an extra pair of knitting needles and a whole blanket of yarn to the floor, and put my hand on his shoulder. “Loki?” My heart and breathing were trying to decide whether to over function or under-function. “Loki, what’s the matter?” He slowly stood up, holding onto me.  
“When I was speaking to you of my ‘better way,’ I seem to have confounded the words ‘better’ and ‘worst’,” he said with a faint grin as I steered him to his bed. Of course he’d gone right past it and fallen onto my table. My Loki is a master of being a perpetual emergency.  
“How are you hurt?” I asked, putting a pillow under his head.  
“Stabbed in the shoulder,” he said. I had never seen him sweat before, but it was on his face. One of his sleeves vanished, and I saw that really it was cut off at the shoulder and his arm was bandaged, obviously with one hand, and larger than it ought to have been.  
“Oh, that’s not too bad,” I said, relieved. “It isn’t bleeding much. I’ll just clean it and rebandage it, and make sure you drink some water. I think that is the right thing to do…” I hurried back to my room and came back carrying some linen that I had been going to make garments out of and some water.  
Gently, I took off the bandage. Infected? It looked wrong, but maybe it was infected. “How did this happen?” I asked, sitting on the edge of the bed and washing around it. He flinched. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll ask you later,” I added, attempting to be even gentler.  
“Sigyn, we can’t plan to do anything later,” he said quietly, looking up at me. “Karnilla’s dagger was poisoned.”  
I drew in my breath sharply, quickly rebandaging his wound. “Norns-hood. You’ll be all right. I’ll get some nightshade from the healing rooms—“  
“Snake venom, my dear, not Norns-hood.”  
I felt like I might be ill or faint or both. We call our snakes in Nornheim Fate Worms, because if you are bitten by one, your fate is to die of snakebite. “Loki.”  
He touched my wrist. “Perhaps—,” he said, still quietly, and then he made the noise that people make before they are ill, and I fetched his washbasin.  
He was ill off and on for quite a long time, and when it was over looked terribly as if he were dying. I sat beside him, resisting the temptation to keep nervously checking the pulse in his neck (because I was getting the impression that he wasn’t even alive from the one in his wrist, which obviously wasn’t true); and holding his hand.  
“Afterwards, tell only Heimdall what has happened,” Loki said, looking at me, the lines between his brows. “He’ll bring Thor quickly; should something go wrong and he cannot do that, try to stay unnoticed. Asgard isn’t safe for an unprotected Norn, especially if you’re suspected of having conspired with me.”  
I tried to smile at him. “I’ll be all right. Don’t worry.”  
“You’ll be safe when Thor comes,” Loki assured me. I wasn’t very worried about what would happen to me, but of course he would be. “Tell him…everything that he needs to know to explain this concatenation of catastrophes. What I showed you and told you, also.”  
“I’ll tell him. I promise.”  
Loki smiled a little. “Could you bring me parchment and a pen?”  
I did, and a book to put behind the parchment. He tried to write for a few minutes, glaring at the parchment, pen, and his hands, which were bluing.  
“I could write for you,” I said.  
He handed everything over to me, and thought, looking at nothing. “Are you ready?” he asked.  
“Yes.”  
“To Thor Odinson from Loki, farewell. Your father is not deceased, as far as I know; I am as ignorant of where he is as you are. This war with Nornheim must end.  
“Do not be apprehensive, brother; there is a high probability that I shall remain dead this time. Should I manage to achieve such normality, my last request is that you take care of my wife, Sigyn.”  
Loki stopped talking, and I heard him having trouble breathing—not desperately, but he was. I looked at him anxiously. “I’m all right,” he said quietly. “All circumstances considered. That’s all, for the letter.” I set it on the table beside the bed, so the ink could dry. “No; would you object to adding a little more?”  
I took the parchment back. “I’m ready.”  
“You seemed to think that being a good man and a great king are incompatible. I am confident that they would not be, in your case.” Loki paused, closing his eyes. “Had you wanted the throne, I would not have taken it,” he said, and I had a feeling that he was imagining that he was talking to his brother. “If you are still as credulous as you were when you left, perhaps you can credit that I love you. That is and has been true, even when neither of us would have considered that it could be.” He opened his eyes. “That’s really all,” he said, looking at the paper instead of me, and I set it to dry again, and knew that I should not talk to him about what he had dictated to me.  
His hand felt and looked almost as if he were in Jotun form, when I held it again. “I can’t feel you,” he said in a low voice. I lay down on my side beside him, and carefully put my arm across his chest, and my cheek against his unwounded shoulder. I was managing not to cry, but my eyes were wet. He turned his head towards me. “Remember what I wrote to you, that not everything is worthy of your sadness?” he said. His voice just kept getting quieter.  
“Don’t you dare say that you aren’t,” I said.  
He smiled in a way that meant that he wouldn’t, but only for my sake, and then his eyes closed, and his breathing changed to sleeping breathing. I knew he might never wake up. “Loki, I love you,” I said, barely able to talk, and he smiled slightly. I didn’t know if he’d understood me, or if he was smiling because he’d heard my voice….  
I listened to his heartbeat lose its power for what seemed like forever, forcing myself not to cry because he might hear it and be upset. I think I told him that I loved him hundreds of times, but he didn’t seem to hear me. There had to be something—but all Nornic magicians had tried to cure Fate Worm bites, and nobody had. I wished I’d been able to give him whole years and centuries in which he was happy, instead of just evenings here and there.  
Then he stirred faintly, and asked, “Will Mother arrive soon, Sigyn?”  
“You’ll see her soon,” I said, my heart trying to break.  
“I love you,” he whispered, and then I could tell he was asleep again.  
Something that no magician would have ever done for his patient came to my mind. The only thing that made me worried about trying it was my parents; but there already was a good chance that we were severed permanently. I would try it. My hand was shaking, but I quickly wrote with my finger, over my heart, the rune for an Asgardian and then the rune for fortune, since the Three Norns knew if one would have that. Over his I marked the rune for Asgardian and the rune for ice, as I had done before. Then I marked the rune for gift over my heart and then over his.  
In just a moment, I felt his heart speed up a little, and then a little more, and he breathed as he generally did; and I felt drained, more drained than I would have been after staying up all night. I smiled and fell asleep, expecting that I’d never wake up.


	10. Chapter 10

“Sigyn?” I opened my eyes, feeling completely drowsy. Loki was looking at me, concerned. He gently touched my cheek. “Sigyn, why am I alive and you so fatigued?”  
I was not at my best intellectually. “Drew runes,” I said with an enormous, sleepy, overjoyed smile, and fell back asleep.  
I think it was two days later when I woke up in a healing room with one of the healers sitting next to me drawing pictures of ravens. “Where’s Lo—my husband?” I asked sleepily, turning red because I had almost said ‘Loki.’  
The healer laughed quietly. “Concluding a treaty with Nornheim, my lady Sigyn. He’s been with you whenever he isn’t doing that. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone that you call him Love—or is it Lovey?”  
I fell asleep again before I could die of laughter.  
It was a few more days before I could stay awake for three or four hours and was allowed to return to my rooms. Loki had, indeed, been with me often in the healing room, but he had had to be Odin, and I had been asleep most of the time, so we hadn’t been able to talk much.  
I fell asleep on my sofa one midmorning, and woke, noticing again that the ceiling was gold and wondering again why. Then I looked on the other side of the fireplace, to the chairs, and saw Loki, staring at the cover of our herbal. He looked like he’d never been poisoned, though he looked more strained than I would have expected, since everything seemed to be turning out well. “Loki,” I said, smiling at him and sitting up.  
He smiled at me as if he missed me, and came and sat beside me. “How fare you, my dear?”  
“I’m drowsy, but I’m staying awake better every day or two,” I said. “You look like you’re better.”  
“I would think it had been a dream, were it not for your illness,” he said, looking much more worried than I felt he needed to. “Sigyn, do not doubt my gratitude, but you should not have ‘drawn runes’—did you know it would do this to you?”  
“I just wanted to save you,” I said. “Being a bit sleepy is a very small consequence.”  
He smoothed my wild shorter hairs away from my face, back with the longer ones. “It could have been more than that.”  
I didn’t feel like arguing; I was already feeling sleepy again. “But all fates that end well are good fates, as the saying goes,” I said, smiling. “How is the treaty going—will Queen Karnilla keep it secret that you’re you?”  
“Oh, yes. This treaty gives Nornheim freedom, though it’s stipulated that the Norns must aid Asgard in time of war, and we them. She wishes it to stand. Also she had pardoned you. I told her that you convinced me to spare those Nornic commoners, and that was enough to sway her.”  
“Oh, that’s glorious!” I exclaimed, coming awake. “I’ll be—my parents—“  
“I’ll send you home with honor, as soon as you have recovered,” Loki said quietly to our herbal; and I realized why he was so wistful and worried. He had been so frightened by my risking dying for him that he meant to send me back to Nornheim forever.  
“I’ll go to Nornheim and visit my parents, but not for more than a few days at a time,” I said decidedly.  
Loki shook his head. “You have love, fidelity, courage as my mother did; I will not let you be more like her by meeting some undeserved fate as a result of them. You’ll have a peaceful life. Perhaps you’ll be a mother someday,” he added with a smile. “You would be a sweet one.”  
“I don’t think leaving my husband will work well for that,” I said. I understood why he was trying to send me away, but he would have had not to want me and not need me before I would have left, and neither was so.  
“Both our realms allow a marriage to be dissolved if the man and woman have never behaved as more than friends,” Loki answered. “Your honor will not be smirched.”  
“I would miss you,” I said quietly.  
“I could visit you, occasionally,” he said, pretending not to care so well that a week ago I would have believed that he didn’t. That was the spruce needle that broke the roof.  
“I miss you all the time when you are not with me!” I said. “I miss you when you’re at war, I miss you when you pretend to be Odin, I miss you when I’m in my room, falling asleep, and you’re in yours. I would rather deal with whatever dramatic emergencies you get into for the next four thousand years than only see you whenever you decide to pay a visit.”  
I couldn’t have asked for him to look more like he cared. I held out my hands to him and he held them. “Four thousand years is too great of an estimate, my love,” he said quietly. “I won’t have a happy fate.”  
“Possibly I can change that,” I said. “But if our fate is happy, or sad, or Ragnarok, I want to be with you, because I love you.”  
For a breath, I thought he might still not accept that, but then he bent his head and kissed me.


	11. Epilogue

It was very considerate of baby Nari to have my hair and eyes, since it would have been hard to explain why Odin’s son looked like his deceased older adopted brother. It’s less considerate of him to cry every night instead of sleeping, but he’s a sweet baby and it isn’t his fault if he can’t sleep. I’ll try giving him tea as soon as he is old enough.  
My parents love him. Mother is always inviting people to home see him and hear about him, and Father keeps asking when he’ll be old enough to eat food. Queen Karnilla likes to hint about who his father is, which is irksome. But we have forgiven each other.  
Nari’s sleeping now, in the evening, and Loki is waiting for me to finish writing. If you happen to read this after Ragnarok, and wonder where I was, because I was not in the sagas about it—I am assured that I will have been beside Loki.

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> Credit to Marvel, the Loki fandom (this is the Tumblr of my favorite Loki and Sigyn fan artist: http://loki-and-sigyn-only-fanart.tumblr.com ), Wikipedia, Marvel Cinematic Universe Wiki, Comicvine.gamespot.com, Marvel Database, comicbookmovie.com, etc.
> 
>  
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> In Chapter Nine I used information from something originally from 1907 quoted in this article section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_venom#Vipers_2


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